Countryside in Crisis: how dairy farmers are milked dry

Continuing our series on Britain’s rural blight, Olga Craig reports on the
growing number of dairy farmers forced to sell up

Former dairy farmer Michael Rickatson sold all the cows on his farm near Sheriff Hutton, North Yorkshire, and instead turned his fields to oilseed rapePhoto: Kippa Matthews

By Olga Craig

7:00AM BST 06 Jun 2010

Last week, Michael Rickatson spent a long weekend sightseeing in Edinburgh with friends. On the Sunday, he ran his first ever marathon, finishing in a fairly respectable five hours. “I guess you could say my life has changed dramatically,” he says with a wry smile. “In my old life, taking a break away just wasn’t an option. There was too much work to be done on the farm. A holiday was a luxury I couldn’t afford. I was up at five every morning and working late into the evening.

“I don’t miss the stress or the pressure,” he continues. “I’m certainly healthier and I no longer feel as though life is passing me by while I work every hour God sends just to keep on an even keel. But there is so, so much that I miss about being a dairy farmer. The place is eerily quiet without the cattle. In a way I feel as though I have been through bereavement. I am mourning my old life and just coming to terms with my new one.”

This time last year, Rickatson, 45, was one of Britain’s dwindling band of dairy farmers facing the loss of his livelihood as the big supermarkets drove prices down ever lower. It was an agonising decision: at the end of last year, he hung a “For Sale” sign on his 192-strong herd of Holsteins. He had little option. While a litre of milk was selling for 80p in the supermarkets, those same big stores were paying dairy farmers like him only 25p a litre – the exact amount it costs to produce. He could no longer sustain a living for himself and his mother, Dorothy, on the 250-acre North Yorkshire farm near Sheriff Hutton that had been in the family for 51 years.

Rickatson is far from alone. Each week, nine dairy farmers in Britain are forced to sell up. In the heyday of British dairy farming, there were 28,000 in England and Wales. Today there are just under 11,000. As recently as three years ago, Britain was self-sufficient in milk. Now we import 1.5 million litres a day, mostly from Holland and Denmark. Indeed, the situation has become so dire that the average dairy farmer today makes £20,000 a year while working a 60-hour week.

Rickatson’s solution was to sell the herd (for £1,100 per cow) and diversify into arable farming with a sideline in pheasants. He now grows wheat and oilseed rape and sells the eggs from his 500 birds.

“I did keep 12 cows for sentimental reasons and they have a great old life wandering around, more like pets than anything else,” he says. “My day is more structured now. And I miss working with the animals. My father would be horrified at how things have gone for the dairy farmers. But I know if he were here now, he would tell me I had done the right thing.”

For Rickatson, the future now seems much more rosy. But for those dairy farmers still struggling to make a living, the situation remains bleak.

Traditionally, the solution for the recurring problem of low-price milk has been diversification. Throughout the 7,000-year-old history of milking animals, dairies have been able to turn surplus milk into more valuable produce such as butter, cheese and cream. The farmer’s 25p litre of milk can be turned into something that sells for 15 times as much if it’s a health yogurt made by Danone or Yoplait. All they have to do is add some bacteria, flavouring and a marketing campaign. But these companies manufacture in France and Belgium – where 45 per cent of our yogurt is made – and source their milk there. The cheese we eat is most likely to be made in New Zealand or Latvia. The same is true of butter. Of the most popular supermarket brands only one, Country Life, is made in Britain from British milk. The bulk comes from Denmark and Ireland.

Understandably, the Royal Association of British Dairy Farmers wants supermarkets to source more milk and dairy products from within the UK, and it believes that the Government should pass legislation to force them if necessary. But few of the big chains have shown any inclination to change their ways. “We can’t rely on them if they believe they can get greater profits from foreign dairy products,” says Lyndon Edwards, the association’s chairman.

Many people in the farming fraternity trace the problems back to Britain joining the EU. “That was when the madness began,” says John Evans, whose 200-acre farm in West Yorkshire will shut in the summer. “Part of the agreement made when we joined was that instead of retaining 100 per cent sufficiency at producing milk, we were allowed to produce only 80 per cent of the amount consumed here. Some 250,000 dairy cows were slaughtered.

“Then, with the power of the supermarkets rising, we bowed to Europe again, and the Milk Marketing Board – the farmer-owned monopoly that negotiated the price farmers were paid for their milk – was broken up. This meant that the farmers’ guarantee of a fair price was taken away as the powerful supermarkets and dairy trade forced prices down. And that, in a nutshell, is why dairy farming in Britain is in such a state of utter despair.”

Evans’s father had a herd of what his son refers to as “25 happy milkers”. Today, he says, some farmers say they need at least 500 cows to make a profit. “The cows become simply milk-producing machines. Some are kept indoors all year and feed entirely on silage made from cut grass. It is a cultural outrage and an animal welfare outrage – all caused by the buying power of the supermarkets and the indifference of governments.”

David Mead, whose family has been in dairy farming for four generations, and who is a member of the National Farmers Union council, cites the situation in Canada, where the Milk Marketing Board was retained. “It assesses the milk price by comparing the profitability of businesses outside dairying, which seems a fair way of doing it,” he says. “Especially as it delivers a milk price of 44p a litre to the farmer.

“I accept that when you are Tesco, and your shareholders have their hands outstretched, then every little does help, as you struggle to elevate profits to even more stratospheric levels. What possible objection can they have to introducing open-book accounting so that farmers can see exactly how much profit is being taken from a litre of milk?

“There is no reason we shouldn’t be receiving the same price as the Canadians. It is ridiculous that milk is being sold at half the price of bottled water.”

For Michael Rickatson, the anxious days of too little profit and too much loss are now over. But there are always reminders. Last week, while out for a drive with a friend, he came upon his old herd grazing in a field.

“I would so have loved to open the gate and walk among them, just to get back that feeling of being a dairy man. Deciding to sell up was the toughest thing I have ever done. But the way forward now is to make a go of things as an arable farmer. There is no future for the dairy farmer. Not with the pittance the supermarkets are paying for milk.”